Chapter 6

Once back in his dismal cell, Joe sat on a metal cot, the only piece of available furniture. At once, he began to think of how he could manage to break out of the Pinhill jailhouse. After Sergeant Rawls had placed him in the cell and walked down the hall and out of sight, Joe got up and started a quick examination of the walls. They felt like solid concrete. He checked the barred door. It was thick, heavy steel and he had seen Rawls take the keys with him.

“No hope of the old snag-the-keys-off-the-wall-with-my-belt routine,” he muttered to himself. Next he looked over the linoleum floor and gave it several healthy stomps in various places. It seemed solid. Last was the ceiling.

It was ancient plaster of some kind, chipped and cracked. He stood on the cot and pryed at a large crack in the plaster with his fingers.

It started to crumble immediately.

In five mintues Joe had removed a sizeable chunk of powdery, crumbled ceiling and was looking at the tongue and groove subfloor of the second story. He quickly ran his fingers along it until he found a place where two pieces of wood had been butted together.

He jumped silently off the cot and looked through the barred door and down the hallway. No one was in sight.

“Damn”, he thought, “If they catch me, I’m never gonna convince them . . .But, on the other hand, what the hell?! They’re already convinced!”

Having convinced himself the coast was clear, he pulled out the set of guitar strings in his back pocket. He uncoiled the four wound strings of the set, jumped back up on the cot and started to shove part of the strings, one by one, into the butted joint of the moldy old tongue and groove wood. Once looped through the joint, he slid the strings across as far as they would go, grabbed a dangling opposite end of strings in each hand and started to saw back and forth.

After twenty minutes of this, Joe had a small, rectangular section of the ceiling removed between two of the subfloor framing beams. He also had many deep-red painful grooves and several bleeding lacerations on his hands. Nickel-plated steel strings are manufactured to withstand and, or inflict quite a bit of punishment.

The floor of the room above looked to be rotting and warped one by sixes. He pushed at one of the boards. It started to give and pry upwards, but he wasn’t tall enough to knock it completely loose.

Suddenly, he heard the clomp and scuff of boots coming down the hallway towards his cell.

Joe quickly jumped down, slid the plaster and wood fragments of the ceiling under the cot and sat down on the saw-string-dust pile that had gathered on the bed.

It was Sergeant Rawls, “Hey, boy. You want somethin’ to drink or eat?”

Joe tried to keep the nervous edge he felt out of his reply, “Uh, . . . No. No, thanks.

I don’t need anything ( . . . except to be left alone for a little while longer, he added to himself).”
“Well, I’m fixin’ to go down to the corner store fer some dip, so I thought maybe if you wanted somethin’ . . .”

Joe knew the longer this guy stood there, the more probable it was he would notice the hole in the ceiling. Or, at least that he was hiding his bloodied hands by sitting on them, acting extremely nervous and didn’t know how long he could keep it under control. If Rawls picked up on that last part, he may want to know why.

Rawls stood looking at Joe in the damp, dark little cell for a few more seconds. He did, of course, notice Joe’s anxiety, but attributed it to the fact that he knew it was the first time ‘the poor boy’ had ever been in trouble with the law, much less incarcerated for murder. Sergeant Rawls actually felt a little sorry for Joe and was trying to be helpful.

“Well, if you do want anythin’ just—”

Joe cut him off abruptly, “Let you know. Thanks, I’ll do that.” Joe wasn’t sure he could take this much longer. Was the guy trying to break him down?

Of course, the more freaked out Joe acted or talked the more sympathy Rawls felt for him. He forged on, “Look, Smith. I knowed the fella you off’d. A real sorry-ass sumbitch, Jimmy Hollowy. Grew up ’round here with him. Like most of the traffic we get through here: Big, useless, usually drunk and shit fer brains. And I know you ain’t like that type of character. So’s I thought maybe you could use some company or somethin’ to eat to take yer mind off of yer problems . . . But, if you don’t want nothin’ right now . . .Well, ya’ll just let me know if you change yer mind . . . I’ll be goin’ to the corner store now and I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

By this point Joe’s underarms were perspiring heavily and his forehead was starting to produce hot pronounced beads of sweat as well, “Uh . . .well, thanks, then . . . but, uh, no. I just need to be alone to . . . think. Yeah, to think. Then, I’ll be okay . . . ”

Rawls continued to look at Joe for several more excruciating seconds, then, casually turned and sauntered back down the hallway.

“Shit, shit, shit, shit, ” Joe muttered to himself and ran his blood-stained, saw-string-dust, grime-covered hands through his hair. Then, he rubbed his eyes and temples. Since there was no mirror in the cell, he had no idea that he had just unintentionally given himself an impressive and frightening maniacal-warpaint-facial makeover.

When he was sure Rawls wasn’t coming back to cheer him up, he propped the metal cot against the wall and climbed its spartan springs. Now, close enough to the second story floorboards he began to push at them slowly and carefully. He managed to pry one of the boards up and saw that the upstairs was dark and quiet.

Within ten minutes he had disloged enough floorboards to pull himself up through the cell ceiling and was panting heavily, crawling around the floor of the second story feeling out the surroundings. Unwittingly, he crawled into a file cabinet and cut a slice on his forearm. Soon he saw a window illuminated from outside by a street light. He moved over to it, peeked out and found himself looking down on Pinhill’s Main Street.

And Sergeant Rawls was crossing the street headed back for the station house with a can of soda! “Oh, shit. Friendly Officer Rawls got me a damn soda,” Joe thought.

Once orientated, he quickly found the back side of the building. He located a rear window that overlooked the deserted back alley behind the police station, opened it, dropped down to the street and became a silent, fleeting blood-stained shawdow on it’s way to River Road in order to be present when Mary Gulder got home.